Veterans are an important part of American society in light of their many sacrifices for our safety. They also make up a significant portion of our population: 7.3% of the 251 million Americans 18 and older are vets. But these heroes can face a number of difficulties when reintegrating into civilian life, particularly when it comes to their finances. This makes it important that veterans place themselves in cities where they can thrive, save and plan for their future. Below we look at a slew of factors to find the cities where veterans are thriving professionally.

In order to discover where veterans are faring the best, we examined data on six different metrics. Specifically, we looked at the percent of residents who are veterans, veteran unemployment rate, veteran labor force participation rate, veteran poverty rate, median veteran income and veteran income as a percent of local rent costs. Check out our data and methodology below for more information about where we got our data and how we put it together to create our final rankings.

Key Findings

Virginia tops the list – The top three places where vets are thriving are in Old Dominion. This should not be too surprising. Virginia is home to the Department of Defense, along with many other government institutions that employ veterans.

Big cities scored poorly – The bottom-20-ranked cities include some of the nation’s largest. Specifically, Chicago, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit and Miami are all part of that cohort.